Voice from the Depths
Maxim Gorky. By Richard Hare. (O.U.P., 21s.)
ONLY by the exercise of a powerful imagination can one hope to write a convincing study of so vital a personality as Maxim Gorky. Unfortu- nately, academic writers like Mr. Richard Hare, while possessing the necessary knowledge, lack the imaginative power to place themselves in the situations their subjects lived through. One of the results of this disharmony between reason and feeling is that though the author of such a study may often be illuminating, he is some- times plain silly.
Mr. Hare, for instance, sees Gorky 'flashing like a streak of lightning' over 'the quiet twilight horizon of the Russian eighteen-nineties,' a decade which was anything but quiet when one considers the swelling discontent among the Russian peasantry and the growing revolutionary agitation among the town proletariat. If things were so quiet during that period, what made Alexey Peshkov so bitter that he assumed the pseudonym Gorky? Mr. Hare also blames Gorky for 'deliberately' painting 'the blackest picture' of the Russian factory workers in his novel Mother, which in view of the quite ap- palling conditions of the workers at the very start of the industrial revolution in Russia is grotesquely misleading. So is Mr. Hare's remark that 'the spreading swarm of hungry tramps threatened the whole structure of Russian society,' and many similar statements.
Mr. Hare, in fact, is more interested in Gorky's journalistic activities than in his creative works. His analysis of Gorky's first stories, or, for that matter, his lengthier discussion of The Artamonovs, amounts to little more than a brief rdsumB of their plots. He does not attempt to explain why Gorky's fiction exerted such a tremendous influence on his contem- poraries and, indeed, on Russian readers in general. Nor does he analyse the remarkable qualities of Gorky's prose and its latent power to engage the reader's emotions. Is it, one can- not help wondering, because Mr. Hare is un- aware of these qualities that he makes no attempt to provide a critical assessment of Gorky's great autobiographical trilogy?
As for Gorky's plays, which Mr. Hare finds so disappointing, Gorky himself was well aware of their shortcomings. In his essay on the drama, which Mr. Hare does not mention and which was written as late as 1933—that is, three years before his death—Gorky wrote: I have written almost twenty plays and all of them are nothing more than a series of badly strung together scenes in which the plot is never firmly outlined and the characters are unfinished, not vivid enough and unconvincing.
Gorky realised very well, too, as he wrote to a friend in 1902, that Satin's speech in The Lower Depths about man and truth was 'far from con- vincing.' He put it into the mouth of Satin, Gorky explained, 'because there was no one else who could deliver it.' Mr. Hare condemns Satin's speech 'as a dramatic warning of the disastrous way half-educated men can become intoxicated by treacherous and empty slogans.' He could have said the same about the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, Satin is an educated man and, whether in character or not, there is nothing 'treacherous and empty' in his speech about the dignity of man. The figure of a man which Satin sketches in the empty air with his finger as he pronounces these wild words,' Mr. Hare writes, is an appropriate symbol of that vague, soulless, but grotesquely conceited ethic which harassed and puzzled Gorky even when he tried to instil it into the minds of his admiring audience.' All one can say in reply to this is that if Mr. Hare had experienced the things Gorky had experienced in his life and had shown the slightest sympathy for the human problems which form the background of all Gorky's works, he would be less censorious about Gorky's `grotesquely conceited ethic.'
Mr. Hare is on much firmer ground when dis- cussing Gorky's position as a propagandist after his return to Russia in 192S. 'As a guide, philo- sopher and loyal friend,' Mr. Hare writes, 'still aiming instinctively at high artistic and educa- tional standards rather than at the promotion of compulsory political legends, Gorky continued to render valuable services to Russian culture.'
But why should Gorky's 'struggles to save the inherited treasures of prolonged human effort and skill from being trampled underfoot by degenerate and callous philistines' have made him, according to Mr. Gorky, 'a wholehearted reactionary'?
Again, Gorky's attacks on certain aspects of Western life and literature, which Mr. Hare ascribes to the fact that 'Gorky enjoyed a gift of virulent invective,' were not peculiarly charac- teristic of Gorky. Russian writers from Karam- zin to Dostoievsky and the Slavophiles indulged in the same kind of anti-Western invective. 'It was a clear case,' Mr. Hare justly remarks, 'of the pot calling the kettle black and vice versa.'
But, on the other hand, every virulent invective is a symptom of some unresolved inner con- flict. And in Gorky's case it might have been the result of the nagging doubts he was begin- ning to have about a regime whose crimes against the ideals he had always upheld were becoming all too clear to him.
DAVID MAGARSHACK
Previous page
